Wasteland 2 - Preview @ The Gamers Hub

Cast your mind back to 1988 – if you can – and remember the delights of Wasteland. Released in the days before Windows even existed and the Apple II was one of the most desirable pieces of home computing hardware around. Wasteland garnered many fans, fans who went on to play Interplay’s delightfully dark spiritual sequel Fallout and Fallout 2. Since then, Brian Fargo’s original apocalyptic RPG epic has sat unloved. The limelight passed onto Fallout and then Bethesda changed the model into a lush open-world shooter instead of the isometric fare the classic utilised. Now though, 25 years on and 20 years of hard work pushing his idea, Fargo has finally managed to give Wasteland the sequel it deserves thanks to Kickstarter backers.

Brian’s fully aware that if it wasn’t for Kickstarter he, and his team from InXile, wouldn’t be sat in a small room with us at Gamescom showing off the latest build of Wasteland 2. It’s incredibly humbling to hear that the entire team want nothing more than to create a game that both lives up to the Wasteland legacy, but also delivers exactly what the fans want.

And that’s what the team has done. The HUD of your team stats, inventory, map, compass, notes, descriptions etc, is all fully customisable; you can put it wherever you want on screen – if you even want it at all. They’ve also painstakingly written novel-like descriptions for your environments and encounters, aping back to those text-adventure quests of the early days of PC RPGs and the style that the original Wasteland game was loved for. In essence, there’s just so much here that shows that InXile really care about what you as a player, customer and fan really want out of their game.

Their dark and morbidly funny lines of dialogue work even better than they did before thanks to the injection of some internet memes to ground this gritty adventure in a reality we’re all rather familiar with.